Thursday, February 04, 2016

“Islam is Just Christianity Misspelled”

The Muslim world wants to
know what to expect from us. It hates Obama because of his unreliability. To
them, his political ideology resembles some species of mysticism which they do
not share. It much prefers an arrangement based on mutual interests over our
misguided mystical attempts to discover shared values by pretending that Islam is just Christianity misspelled.
(Italics mine.)

I couldn’t
resist using that last part – “Islam is just Christianity misspelled” – as the
thematic title for this column. But it is true. The phrase encapsulates the
common notion that Islam “shares” the same humanistic values as Christianity
and Judaism. The three faiths are alleged to be interchangeable, distinguished
only by their traditions and rituals, with no significant or worrisome doctrinal
differences. Christian and Jewish clerics who engage in “interfaith dialogue”
with Muslims act under the assumption that Islam is just another religion,
basically benign, not out to threaten or hurt anyone or force people to act
against their religious beliefs by converting “peacefully” to Islam.

But there is
no “peaceful” conversion to Islam. Islam tolerates no other religion. It is
fundamentally “anti-coexistence.” To paraphrase Henry Ford’s 1909 dictum, Islam’s
philosophy of coexistence is, “You can have any religion you want as long as
it’s Islam.”*

I discuss the
futility of “interfaith dialogue” in my January 2nd Rule of Reasoncolumn, “Interfaith
Bridges to Islam,” which is based on Stephen Coughlin’s vital critique of
our current and absolutely anemic and counter-productive “War on Terror”
policies, Catastrophic Failure:
Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Coughlin offers a brutal,
thorough, but necessary vivisection of the pretentions and fallacies of
interfaith dialogue. I noted that:

Postmodernism has allowed
Islam unopposed and unparalleled entrée into the minds and values of
Westerners. Coughlin discusses how this entrée works and the consequences of
Christian and Jewish religionists compromising their own beliefs by agreeing to
form a “united front” for peace and coexistence and multi-beliefs with Islam.
He correctly identifies the chief culprit and enabler of Muslim
Brotherhood-dominated interfaith dialogue as postmodernism. Postmodernism is
not incidental to the inroads being made by Islam in the West. It is a key
factor.

Without the assist of
postmodernism – which Islam did not create – neither the Brotherhood nor the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) could exploit the self-criticism of
the West nor inveigle their way into the language and behavior of non-Muslim
interfaith participants. Islam would be stopped cold, told to return to the miserable
pestholes from which it came, and not admitted through the gates of
Aristotelian thought. The shiny shield of reason consistently applied to
everything and every idea could not be breached by the underhanded finagling
and deft finessing machinations of the Brotherhood and the OIC.

A West that doubts or
questions its own value qua West is destined for destruction, either by Islam
or by “its
own hands.” Islam will provide the rope.

But our
political leaders, academia, and the news media all “blank out” the fundamental
nature of Islam – that it is totalitarian – and Islam’s primary and steadfast
goal: the imposition of Sharia law on the West and on America.

Greenfield
continued near the end of his column:

It’s not an
immigration ban that poses a threat to the coalition, it’s the insistence that
shared values come before shared interests. If we are to have shared values
with a Muslim coalition, that requires us to prosecute blasphemy against Islam,
provide a special status to Muslims and a lower status to non-Muslims. Such an
approach is incompatible with our own values, yet we have begun doing just
that. Locking up filmmakers and condemning cartoonists has given us more in
common with Saudi Arabia and ISIS. And it would be unfortunate if we had to
become an Islamic state to fight the Islamic State.

We can best fight ISIS by being a free nation. There is no use in defeating
ISIS just to become ISIS. That will not prevent us from joining coalitions of
shared interests with anyone else, but it will stop us from trying to find
shared values with Islamic tyrannies of the axe, burka and sword. A ban on
Muslim migration will allow us to fight ISIS abroad instead of fighting ISIS
and becoming ISIS at home.

President
Barack Obama indulged in his own brand of “interfaith dialogue” when he spoke
on February 2nd at a Baltimore mosque about “shared values.”

If you listen
to Obama claim – or if you read the transcript
of his Baltimore speech – with his signature, folksy, bilious bombast, that
Muslims contributed greatly to America’s history and growth, you would be left
with the impression that Muslims were all over the place, from colonial times
to the present, whooping it up with cowboys in North Dakota, “cranking out
cars” on Henry Ford’s assembly line, designing Chicago’s skyscrapers – and that
Muslims were Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s best friends and regular house
guests. Obama insinuated in his speech that without Muslim contributions,
America would be so much the poorer. To his hand-picked and highly-screened
audience he said:

Generations of Muslim
Americans helped to build our nation. They were part of the flow of immigrants
who became farmers and merchants. They built America’s first mosque,
surprisingly enough, in North Dakota. (Laughter.) America’s oldest
surviving mosque is in Iowa. The first Islamic center in New York City
was built in the 1890s. Muslim Americans worked on Henry Ford’s assembly
line, cranking out cars. A Muslim American designed the skyscrapers of
Chicago.

There was one
claim in his speech that piqued my curiosity, that a Muslim designed many of
Chicago’s skyscrapers. So, I did a search, and found Fazlur Rahman
Khan (3 April 1929 – 27 March 1982; naturalized American
citizen, 1967). Khan was from Bangladesh. It is highly doubtful that this
accomplished man had been a practicing Muslim. Reading his life story, you
can't imagine him taking time out five times a day to perform the self-abnegating
Islamic prayer ritual. Further, he can't have been a practicing Muslim when “He
believed that engineers needed a broader perspective on life, saying, ‘The
technical man must not be lost in his own technology; he must be able to
appreciate life, and life is art, drama, music, and most importantly,
people.’"

Islam frowns on, if not outright prohibits, art, drama, and music.

But Obama insinuates that Islam was somehow responsible for the man’s
achievements. Not the man himself. Obama suggested that Khan was accomplished
because he was a Muslim, not in spite of it. Assuming, that is, that Khan was
not an apostate or a lapsed Muslim.

In his speech lauding Muslims and Islam, Obama employed all the
flattering “puffery” devices invented by Mr. Puff in Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s comedy, The Critic,
all intended by Obama to inflate the
“self-esteem” of Muslims and the Muslim “community”: the
puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collusive, the puff collateral,
and the puff oblique (or by implication). And also intended to put over a lie
and a fraud.**

Pamela Geller, in her February 3rd Atlas Shrugs column, “Radical
Speech: Muslims
Keep Us Safe,” stressed the evasive deviousness of Obama in Baltimore:

In the wake of the
San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Paris and Garland jihad attacks, President Obama
visited a radical mosque in Baltimore today.

“An attack on one
religion is an attack on all religions,” Obama says as he visits a U.S. mosque
for the first time as president.

Pathetic. The
only religion attacking, subjugating and slaughtering members of other
religions en masse is Islam. The religion attacking other religions is Islam.
President Obama speaks nothing of this. Gender apartheid, creed apartheid,
cultural annihilation, jihad wars, and enslavement are raging across the world
under his presidency. And yet Obama proselytizes for Islam.

This is nothing new. Obama has been engaged in his own brand of dawah since his first day in office. And Islam has been on the warpath for 1,400
years.

Geller went on:, quoting Obama:

“For more than a
thousand years people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace,” Obama says
of Islam. [Islam has been on the warpath for 1,400 years.]

He neglects to
mention that it is at the end of a sword. [Convert, or else.]

He gives Hollywood
his marching orders: “Our TV shows should have some Muslim characters that are
unrelated to national security,” “It’s not that hard to do.”

“Muslim Americans
keep us safe,” Obama says as he visits
a U.S. mosque for the first time as president. “They are our police. They
are our fire fighters. They’re in Homeland Security.”

No one takes issue
with law-abiding, peaceful Muslims. But there are millions of Muslims waging
jihad in the cause of Allah. What about them? And why is opposition to jihad
terror labeled “anti-Muslim”?

As for the Muslims
working at Homeland Security, how have they been vetted? By appointing Muslim
Brotherhood operative Mohamed Elibiary a senior member of DHS’ Homeland
Security Advisory Council (HSAC), then we have serious problems.

This is where I disagree with Geller. Islam is not an incubator of
individualism, it is not a fountainhead of independent thought, it is not a
promoter of independence from the crowd, from the mob, from the collective, from
the herd. It is a totalitarian cult that attracts selfless conformists because it
saves them the bother of egoism. It saves the intellectually lazy the effort of
thinking for themselves. “Law-abiding, peaceful Muslims” frankly constitute a
fifth column of the Muslim Brotherhood’s overall plan to Islamize America. They
are oblivious to or hostile to any Freedom of Speech or First Amendment issue. They
simply parrot whatever their spokesmen say in public. When Muslim spokesmen
speak of “Freedom of Speech” or “Freedom of Religion,” they are talking about a
Muslim’s freedoms, not those of non-Muslim.

In Baltimore, Obama touched on ISIS and other “radical” Islamic terrorist
gangs:

Now, we do have
another fact that we have to acknowledge. Even as the overwhelming
majority -- and I repeat, the overwhelming majority -- of the world’s Muslims
embrace Islam as a source of peace, it is undeniable that a small fraction of
Muslims propagate a perverted interpretation of Islam. This is the
truth.

Groups like al Qaeda
and ISIL, they’re not the first extremists in history to misuse God’s
name. We’ve seen it before, across faiths. But right now, there is an
organized extremist element that draws selectively from Islamic texts, twists
them in an attempt to justify their killing and their terror. They
combine it with false claims that America and the West are at war with
Islam. And this warped thinking that has found adherents around the world
– including, as we saw, tragically, in Boston and Chattanooga and San
Bernardino – is real. It’s there. And it creates tensions and
pressure that disproportionately burden the overwhelming majority of
law-abiding Muslim citizens.

And that overwhelming majority of “law-abiding Muslim citizens” is
largely silent about the mass crimes committed in their religion’s name. Islam has
not been “perverted,” nor has it been “hijacked.” The “violent”
verses that ISIS and other groups cite as justifications for terrorism
abrogated or replaced the earlier, “peaceful” ones. Terrorism, per Sharia and
scholarly interpretations of Islam, refers exclusively to Muslims killing other
Muslims. However, Muslims killing non-Muslims is condoned and encouraged in the
Koran and Hadith.

Christianity
and Judaism, while as mystical as Islam, at least offer individuals a chance
to live independent lives and to make independent choices. Islam, which means submission;, does not. it does not mean “peace,”
or “peace be upon you,” as Obama claimed in his speech. (“And the very word
itself, Islam, comes from salam -- peace. The standard greeting is
as-salamu alaykum -- peace be upon you” – if you’re a Muslim. If not, then no
peace for you.) Islam is totalitarian, root, branch, and trunk, as Judaism and
Christianity never were.

1 comment:

One thing I'd point out is that advocates of open immigration (Objectivists and otherwise) have gotten in Europe what they have asked for: mass immigration with minimal screening. I have yet to hear anyone say that he or she was wrong.